There’s often much speculation surrounding what may be seen in upcoming and updated devices and new versions of Android. Most of this talk unfortunately centers around leaked images of some sort, rather than any hard evidence. Once in a while, however, genuine clues are discovered that help paint a picture of what’s to come.
A little over a week ago, a pair of commits were made to the AOSP master tree that essentially prevent SU from executing files stored on the /data partition. This is an issue because many (but not all) current root apps include files that are extracted to and executed from app-specific directories on this partition. As such, if these commits are not reverted, a large number of current root-enabled apps will need be updated in order to work with this new version of Android.
So if you’re an app developer responsible for creating root-enabled apps, how can you get around these changes? Well, XDA Senior Recognized Developer Chainfire has you covered with a few potential workarounds that were added to his How-To SU page. These workarounds include extracting the code and running it from RAM or rootfs, piping commands directly to SU, and so on.